side, and the ignorant rejection of theory altogether on the other side,
are beginning to be seen as both alike unjustified. We begin to find the
grounds for a sounder theory. Not indeed that the problems of sex, which
go so deeply into the whole personal and social life, can ever be settled
exclusively upon physiological grounds. But we have done much to prepare
even the loftiest Building of Love when we have attained a clear view of
its biological basis.

The progress of chemico-physiological research during recent years has now
brought us to new ground for our building. Indeed the image might well be
changed altogether, and it might be said that science has entirely
transferred the drama of reproduction to a new stage with new actors.
Therewith the immense emphasis placed on excretion, and the inevitable
reaction that emphasis aroused, both alike disappear. The sexual
protagonists are no longer at the surface but within the most secret
recesses of the organism, and they appear to science under the name of
Hormones or Internal Secretions, always at work within and never
themselves condescending to appear at all. Those products of the sexual
glands which in both sexes are cast out of the body, and at an immature
stage of knowledge appeared to be excretions, are of primary reproductive
importance, but, as regards the sexual constitution of the individual,
they are of far less importance than the internal secretions of these very
same glands. It is, however, by no means only the specifically sexual
glands which thus exert a sexual influence within the organism. Other
glands in the brain, the throat, and the abdomen,--such as the thyroid and
the adrenals,--are also elaborating fermentative secretions to throw into
the system. Their mutual play is so elaborate that it is only beginning
to be understood. Some internal secretions stimulate, others inhibit, and
the same secretions may under different conditions do either. This fact is
the source of many degrees and varieties of energy and formative power in
the organism. Taken altogether, the internal secretions are the forces
which build up the man's and woman's distinctively sexual constitution:
the special disposition and growth of hair, the relative development of
breasts and pelvis, the characteristic differences in motor activity, the
varying emotional desires and needs. It is in the complex play of these
secretions that we now seek the explanation of all the peculiarities of
sexual constitution, imperfect or one-sided physical and psychic
development, the various approximations of the male to female bodily and
emotional disposition, of the female to the male, all the numerous
gradations that occur, naturally as we now see, between the complete man
and the complete woman.

When we turn the light of this new conception on to our old ideas of
purity,--to the virtue or the vice, accordingly as we may have been
pleased to consider it, of sexual abstinence,--we begin to see that those
ideas need radical revision. They appear in a new light, their whole
meaning is changed. No doubt it may be said they never had the validity
they appeared to possess, even when we judge them by the crudest
criterion, that of practice. Thus, while it is the rule for physicians to
proclaim the advantages of sexual continence, there is no good reason to
believe that they have themselves practised it in any eminent degree. A
few years ago an inquiry among thirty-five distinguished physicians,
chiefly German and Russian, showed that they were nearly all of opinion
that continence is harmless, if not beneficial. But Meirowsky found by
inquiry of eighty-six physicians, of much the same nationalities, that
only one had himself been sexually abstinent before marriage. There seem
to be no similar statistics for the English-speaking countries, where
there exists a greater modesty--though not perhaps notably less need for
it--in the making of such confessions. But if we turn to the allied
profession which is strongly on the side of sexual abstinence, we find
that among theological students, as has been shown in the United States,
while prostitution may be infrequent, no temptation is so frequent or so
potent, and in most cases so irresistible, as that to solitary sexual
indulgence. Such is the actual attitude towards the two least ideal forms
of sexual practice--as distinguished from mere theory--on the part of the
two professions which most definitely pronounce in favour of continence.

It is necessary, however, as will now be clearer, to set our net more
widely. We must take into consideration every form and degree of sexual
manifestation, normal and abnormal, gross and ethereal. When we do this,
even cautiously and without going far afield, sexual abstinence is found
to be singularly elusive. Rohleder, a careful and conscientious
investigator, has asserted that such abstinence, in the true and complete
sense, is absolutely non-existent, the genuine cases in which sexual
phenomena of some kind or other fail to manifest themselves being simply
cases of inborn lack of sexual sensibility. He met, indeed, a few people
who seemed exceptions to the general rule, but, on better knowledge, he
found that he was mistaken, and that so far from being absent in these
people the sexual instinct was present even in its crudest shapes. The
activity of sex is an activity that on the physical side is generated by
the complex mechanism of the ductless glands and displayed in the whole
organism, physical and psychic, of the individual, who cannot abolish that
activity, although to some extent able to regulate the forms in which it
is manifested, so that purity cannot be the abolition or even the
indefinite suspension of sexual manifestations; it must be the wise and
beautiful control of them.

It is becoming clear that the old platitudes can no longer be maintained,
and that if we wish to improve our morals we must first improve our
knowledge.


II

We have seen that various popular beliefs and conventional assumptions
concerning the sexual impulse can no longer be maintained. The sexual
activities of the organism are not mere responses to stimulation, absent
if we choose to apply no stimulus, never troubling us if we run away from
them, harmless if we enclose them within a high wall. Nor do they
constitute a mere excretion, or a mere appetite, which we can control by a
crude system of hygiene and dietetics. We better understand the
psycho-sexual constitution if we regard the motive power behind it as a
dynamic energy, produced and maintained by a complex mechanism at certain
inner foci of the body, and realise that whatever periodic explosive
manifestations may take place at the surface, the primary motive source
lies in the intimate recesses of the organism, while the outcome is the
whole physical and spiritual energy of our being under those aspects which
are most forcible and most aspiring and even most ethereal.

This conception, we find, is now receiving an admirable and beautifully
adequate physical basis in the researches of distinguished physiologists
in various lands concerning the parts played by the ductless glands of the
body, in sensitive equilibrium with each other, pouring out into the
system stimulating and inhibiting hormones, which not only confer on the
man's or woman's body those specific sexual characters which we admire but
at the same time impart the special tone and fibre and polarity of
masculinity or femininity to the psychic disposition. Yet, even before
Brown-Sequard's first epoch-making suggestion had set physiologists to
search for internal secretions, the insight of certain physicians on the
medico-psychological side was independently leading towards the same
dynamic conception. In the middle of the last century Anstie, an acute
London physician, more or less vaguely realised the transformations of
sexual energy into nervous disease and into artistic energy. James Hinton,
whose genius rendered him the precursor of many modern ideas, had
definitely grasped the dynamic nature of sexual activity, and daringly
proposed to utilise it, not only as a solution of the difficulties of the
personal life but for the revolutionary transformation of morality.[5] It
was the wish to group together all the far-flung manifestations of the
inner irresistible process of sexual activity that underlay my own
conception of _auto-erotism_, or the spontaneous erotic impulse which
arises from the organism apart from all definite external stimulation, to
be manifested, or it may be transformed, in mere solitary physical sex
activity, in dreams of the night, in day-dreams, in shapes of literature
and art, in symptoms of nervous disorder such as some forms of hysteria,
and even in the most exalted phases of mystical devotion. Since then, a
more elaborate attempt to develop a similar dynamic conception of sexual
activity has been made by Freud; and the psycho-analysts who have followed
him, or sometimes diverged, have with endless subtlety, and courageous
thoroughness, traced the long and sinuous paths of sexual energy in
personality and in life, indeed in all the main manifestations of human
activity.

[5] "The man who separated the thought of chastity from Service and made
it revolve round Self," wrote Hinton half a century ago in his
unpublished MSS., "betrayed the human race." "The rule of Self," he
wrote again, "has two forms: Self-indulgence and Self-virtue; and Nature
has two weapons against it: pain and pleasure.... A restraint must
always be put away when another's need can be served by putting it away;
for so is restored to us the force by which Life is made.... How curious
it seems! the true evil things are our _good_ things. Our thoughts of
duty and goodness and chastity, those are the things that need to be
altered and put aside; these are the barriers to true goodness.... I
foresee the positive denial of _all_ positive morals, the removal of
_all_ restrictions. I feel I do not know what 'license,' as we should
term it, may not truly belong to the perfect state of Man. When there is
no self surely there is no restriction; as we see there is none in
Nature.... May we not say of marriage as St. Augustine said of God:
'Rather would I, not finding, find Thee, than finding, not find
Thee'?... 'Because we like' is the sole legitimate and perfect motive of
human action.... If this is what Nature affirms then it will be what I
believe." This dynamic conception of the sexual impulse, as a force
that, under natural conditions, may be trusted to build up a new
morality, obviously belongs to an indefinitely remote future. It is a
force whose blade is two-edged, for while it strikes at unselfishness it
also strikes at selfishness, and at present we cannot easily conceive a
time when "there is no self"; we should be more disposed to regard it as
a time when there is much humbug. Yet for the individual this conception
of the constructive power of love retains much enlightenment and
inspiration.

It is important for us to note about this dynamic sexual energy in the
constitution that while it is very firmly and organically rooted, and
quite indestructible, it assumes very various shapes. On the physical side
all the characters of sexual distinction and all the beauties of sexual
adornment are wrought by the power furnished by the co-operating furnaces
of the glands, and so also, on the psychic side, are emotions and impulses
which range from the simplest longings for sensual contact to the most
exalted rapture of union with the Infinite. Moreover, there is a certain
degree of correlation between the physical and the psychic manifestation
of sexual energy, and, to some extent, transformation is possible in the
embodiment of that energy.

A vague belief in the transformation of sexual energy has long been
widespread. It is apparently shown in the idea that continence, as an
economy in the expenditure of sexual force, may be practised to aid the
physical and mental development, while folklore reveals various sayings in
regard to the supposed influence of sexual abstinence in the causation of
insanity. There is a certain underlying basis of reason in such beliefs,
though in an unqualified form they cannot be accepted, for they take no
account of the complexity of the factors involved, of the difficulty and
often impossibility of effecting any complete transformation, either in a
desirable or undesirable direction, and of the serious conflict which the
process often involves. The psycho-analysts have helped us here. Whether
or not we accept their elaborate and often shifting conceptions, they have
emphasised and developed a psychological conception of sexual energy and
its transformations, before only vaguely apprehended, which is now seen to
harmonise with the modern physiological view.

The old notion that sexual activity is merely a matter of the voluntary
exercise, or abstinence from exercise, of the reproductive functions of
adult persons has too long obstructed any clear vision of the fact that
sexuality, in the wide and deep sense, is independent of the developments
of puberty. This has long been accepted as an occasional and therefore
abnormal fact, but we have to recognise that it is true, almost or quite
normally, even of early childhood. No doubt we must here extend the word
"sexuality"[6]--in what may well be considered an illegitimate way--to
cover manifestations which in the usual sense are not sexual or are at
most called "sexual perversions." But this extension has a certain
justification in view of the fact that these manifestations can be seen to
be definitely related to the ordinary adult forms of sexuality. However
we define it, we have to recognise that the child takes the same kind of
pleasure in those functions which are natural to his age as the adult is
capable of taking in localised sexual functions, that he may weave ideas
around such functions, sometimes cultivate their exercise from love of
luxury, make them the basis of day-dreams which at puberty, when the
ideals of adult life are ready to capture his sexual energy, he begins to
grow ashamed of.

[6] Perhaps, as applied to the period below puberty, it would be more
exact to say "pseudo-sexuality." Matsumato has lately pointed out the
significance of the fact that the interstitial testicular tissue,
essential to the hormonic function of the testes, only becomes active at
puberty.

At this stage, indeed, we reach a crucial point, though it has usually
been overlooked, in the lives of boys and girls, more especially those
whose heredity may have been a little tainted or their upbringing a little
twisted. For it is here that the transformation of energy and the
resulting possibilities of conflict are wont to enter. In the harmoniously
developing organism, one may say, there is at this period a gradual and
easy transmutation of the childish pleasurable activities into adult
activities, accompanied perhaps by a feeling of shame for the earlier
feelings, though this quickly passes into a forgetfulness which often
leads the adult far astray when he attempts to understand the psychic life
of the child. The childish manifestations, it must be remarked, are not
necessarily unwholesome; they probably perform a valuable function and
develop budding sexual emotions, just as the petals of flowers are
developed in pale and contorted shapes beneath the enveloping sheaths.

But in our human life the transmutation is often not so easy as in
flowers. Normally, indeed, the adolescent transformations of sex are so
urgent and so manifold--now definite sensual desire, now muscular impulses
of adventure, now emotional aspirations in the sphere of art or
religion--that they easily overwhelm and absorb all its vaguer and more
twisted manifestations in childhood. Yet it may happen that by some
aberration of internal development or of external influence this
conversion of energy may at one point or another fail to be completely
effected. Then some fragment of infantile sexuality survives, in rare
cases to turn all the adult faculties to its service and become reckless
and triumphant, in minor and more frequent cases to be subordinated and
more or less repressed into the subconscious sphere by voluntary or even
involuntary and unconscious effort. Then we may have conflict, which, when
it works happily, exerts a fortifying and ennobling influence on
character, when more unhappily a disturbing influence which may even lead
to conditions of definite nervous disorder.

The process by which this fundamental sexual energy is elevated from
elementary and primitive forms into complex and developed forms is termed
sublimation, a term, originally used for the process of raising by heat a
solid substance to the state of vapour, which was applied even by such
early writers as Drayton and Davies in a metaphorical and spiritual
sense.[7] In the sexual sphere sublimation is of vital importance because
it comes into question throughout the whole of life, and our relation to
it must intimately affect our conception of morality. The element of
athletic asceticism which is a part of all virility, and is found
even--indeed often in a high degree--among savages, has its main moral
justification as one aid to sublimation. Throughout life sublimation acts
by transforming some part at all events of the creative sexual energy from
its elementary animal manifestations into more highly individual and
social manifestations, or at all events into finer forms of sexual
activity, forms that seem to us more beautiful and satisfy us more widely.
Purity, we thus come to see is, in one aspect, the action of sublimation,
not abolishing sexual activity, but lifting it into forms of which our
best judgment may approve.

[7] We may gather the history of the term from the _Oxford Dictionary_.
Bodies, said Davies, are transformed to spirit "by sublimation strange,"
and Ben Jonson in _Cynthia's Revels_ spoke of a being "sublimated and
refined"; Purchas and Jackson, early in the same seventeenth century,
referred to religion as "sublimating" human nature, and Jeremy Taylor, a
little later, to "subliming" marriage into a sacrament; Shaftesbury,
early in the eighteenth century, spoke of human nature being "sublimated
by a sort of spiritual chemists" and Welton, a little later, of "a love
sublimate and refined," while, finally, and altogether in our modern
sense, Peacock in 1816 in his _Headlong Hall_ referred to "that
enthusiastic sublimation which is the source of greatness and energy."

We must not suppose--as is too often assumed--that sublimation can be
carried out easily, completely, or even with unmixed advantage. If it were
so, certainly the old-fashioned moralist would be confronted by few
difficulties, but we have ample reason to believe that it is not so. It is
with sexual energy, well observes Freud, who yet attaches great importance
to sublimation, as it is with heat in our machines: only a certain
proportion can be transformed into work. Or, as it is put by Loewenfeld,
who is not a constructive philosopher but a careful and cautious medical
investigator, the advantages of sublimation are not received in specially
high degree by those who permanently deny to their sexual impulse every
natural direct relief. The celibate Catholic clergy, notwithstanding their
heroic achievements in individual cases, can scarcely be said to display a
conspicuous excess of intellectual energy, on the whole, over the
non-celibate Protestant clergy; or, if we compare the English clergy
before and after the Protestant Reformation, though the earlier period may
reveal more daring and brilliant personages, the whole intellectual output
of the later Church may claim comparison with that of the earlier Church.
There are clearly other factors at work besides sublimation, and even
sublimation may act most potently, not when the sexual activities sink or
are driven into a tame and monotonous subordination, but rather when they
assume a splendid energy which surges into many channels. Yet sublimation
is a very real influence, not only in its more unconscious and profound
operations, but in its more immediate and temporary applications, as part
of an athletic discipline, acting best perhaps when it acts most
automatically, to utilise the motor energy of the organism in the
attainment of any high physical or psychic achievement.

We have to realise, however, that these transmutations do not only take
place by way of a sublimation of sexual energy, but also by way of a
degradation of that energy. The new form of energy produced, that is to
say, may not be of a beneficial kind; it may be of a mischievous kind, a
form of perversion or disease. Sexual self-denial, instead of leading to
sublimation, may lead to nervous disorder when the erotic tension, failing
to find a natural outlet and not sublimated to higher erotic or non-erotic
ends in the real world, is transmuted into an unreal dreamland, thus
undergoing what Jung terms introversion; while there are also the people
already referred to, in whom immature childish sexuality persists into an
adult stage of development it is no longer altogether in accord with, so
that conflict, with various possible trains of nervous symptoms, may
result. Disturbances and conflicts in the emotional sexual field may, we
know, in these and similar ways become transformed into physical symptoms
of disorder which can be seen to have a precise symbolic relationship to
definite events in the patient's emotional history, while fits of nervous
terror, or anxiety-neurosis, may frequently be regarded as a degradation
of thwarted or disturbed sexual energy, manifesting its origin by
presenting a picture of sexual excitation transposed into a non-sexual
shape of an entirely useless or mischievous character.

Thus, to sum up, we may say that the sexual energy of the organism is a
mighty force, automatically generated throughout life. Under healthy
conditions that force is transmuted in more or less degree, but never
entirely, into forms that further the development of the individual and
the general ends of life. These transformations are to some extent
automatic, to some extent within the control of personal guidance. But
there are limits to such guidance, for the primitive human personality can
never be altogether rendered an artificial creature of civilisation. When
these limits are reached the transmutation of sexual energy may become
useless or even dangerous, and we fail to attain the exquisite flower of
Purity.


III

It may seem that in setting forth the nature of the sexual impulse in the
light of modern biology and psychology, I have said but little of purity
and less of morality. Yet that is as it should be. We must first be
content to see how the machine works and watch the wheels go round. We
must understand before we can pretend to control; in the natural world, as
Bacon long ago said, we can only command by obeying. Moreover, in this
field Nature's order is far older and more firmly established than our
civilised human morality. In our arrogance we often assume that Morality
is the master of Nature. Yet except when it is so elementary or
fundamental as to be part of Nature, it is but a guide, and a guide that
is only a child, so young, so capricious, that in every age its wayward
hand has sought to pull Nature in a different direction. Even only in
order to guide we must first see and know.

We realise that never more than when we observe the distinction which
conventional sex-morals so often makes between men and women. Failing to
find in women exactly the same kind of sexual emotions, as they find in
themselves, men have concluded that there are none there at all. So man
has regarded himself as the sexual animal, and woman as either the passive
object of his adoring love or the helpless victim of his degrading lust,
in either case as a being who, unlike man, possessed an innocent "purity"
by nature, without any need for the trouble of acquiring it. Of woman as a
real human being, with sexual needs and sexual responsibilities, morality
has often known nothing. It has been content to preach restraint to man,
an abstract and meaningless restraint even if it were possible. But when
we have regard to the actual facts of life, we can no longer place virtue
in a vacuum. Women are just as apt as men to be afflicted by the petty
jealousies and narrownesses of the crude sexual impulse; women just as
much as men need the perpetual sublimation of erotic desire into forms of
more sincere purity, of larger harmony, in gaining which ends all the
essential ends of morality are alone gained. The delicate adjustment of
the needs of each sex to the needs of the other sex to the end of what
Chaucer called fine loving, the adjustment of the needs of both sexes to
the larger ends of fine living, may well furnish a perpetual moral
discipline which extends its fortifying influence to men and women alike.

It is this universality of sexual emotion, blending in its own mighty
stream, as is now realised, many other currents of emotion, even the
parental and the filial, and traceable even in childhood,--the wide
efflorescence of an energy constantly generated by a vital internal
mechanism,--which renders vain all attempts either to suppress or to
ignore the problem of sex, however immensely urgent we might foolishly
imagine such attempts to be. Even the history of the early Christian
ascetics in Egypt, as recorded in the contemporary _Paradise_ of
Palladius, illustrates the futility of seeking to quench the unquenchable,
the flame of fire which is life itself. These "athletes of the Lord" were
under the best possible conditions for the conquest of lust; they had been
driven into the solitude of the desert by a genuine deeply-felt impulse,
they could regulate their lives as they would, and they possessed an
almost inconceivable energy of resolution. They were prepared to live on
herbs, even to eat grass, and to undertake any labour of self-denial. They
were so scrupulous that we hear of a holy man who would even efface a
woman's footprints in the sand lest a brother might thereby be led into
thoughts of evil. Yet they were perpetually tempted to seductive visions
and desires, even after a monastic life of forty years, and the women seem
to have been not less liable to yield to temptation than the men.

It may be noted that in the most perfect saints there has not always been
a complete suppression of the sexual impulse even on the normal plane, nor
even, in some cases, the attempt at such complete suppression. In the
early days of Christianity the exercise of chastity was frequently
combined with a close and romantic intimacy of affection between the
sexes which shocked austere moralists. Even in the eleventh century we
find that the charming and saintly Robert of Arbrissel, founder of the
order of Fontevrault, would often sleep with his nuns, notwithstanding the
remonstrances of pious friends who thought he was displaying too heroic a
manifestation of continence, failing to understand that he was effecting a
sweet compromise with continence. If, moreover, we consider the rarest and
finest of the saints we usually find that in their early lives there was a
period of full expansion of the organic activities in which all the
natural impulses had full play. This was the case with the two greatest
and most influential saints of the Christian Church, St. Augustine and St.
Francis of Assisi, absolutely unlike as they were in most other respects.
Sublimation, we see again and again, is limited, and the best developments
of the spiritual life are not likely to come about by the rigid attempt to
obtain a complete transmutation of sexual energy.

The old notion that any strict attempt to adhere to sexual abstinence is
beset by terrible risks, insanity and so forth, has no foundation, at all
events where we are concerned with reasonably sound and healthy people.
But it is a very serious error to suppose that the effort to achieve
complete and prolonged sexual abstinence is without any bad results at
all, physical or psychic, either in men or women who are normal and
healthy. This is now generally recognised everywhere, except in the
English-speaking countries, where the supposed interests of a prudish
morality often lead to a refusal to look facts in the face. As Professor
Naecke, a careful and cautious physician, stated shortly before his death,
a few years ago, the opinion that sexual abstinence has no bad effects is
not to-day held by a single authority on questions of sex; the fight is
only concerned with the nature and degree of the bad effects which, in
Naecke's belief--and he was doubtless right--are never of a gravely serious
character.

Yet we have also to remember that not only, as we have seen, is the effort
to achieve complete abstinence--which we ignorantly term "purity"--futile,
since we are concerned with a force which is being constantly generated
within the organism, but in the effort to achieve it we are abusing a
great source of beneficent energy. We lose more than half of what we might
gain when we cover it up, and try to push it back, to produce, it may be,
not harmonious activity in the world, but merely internal confusion and
distortion, and perhaps the paralysis of half the soul's energy. The
sexual activities of the organism, we cannot too often repeat, constitute
a mighty source of energy which we can never altogether repress though by
wise guidance we may render it an aid not only to personal development
and well-being but to the moral betterment of the world. The attraction of
sex, according to a superstition which reaches far back into antiquity, is
a baleful comet pointing to destruction, rather than a mighty star to
which we may harness our chariot. It may certainly be either, and which it
is likely to become depends largely on our knowledge and our power of
self-guidance.

In old days when, as we have seen, tradition, aided by the most fantastic
superstitions, insisted on the baleful aspects of sex, the whole emphasis
was placed against passion. Since knowledge and self-guidance, without
which passion is likely to be in fact pernicious, were then usually
absent, the emphasis was needed, and when Boehme, the old mystic, declared
that the art of living is to "harness our fiery energies to the service of
the light," it has recently been even maintained that he was the solitary
pioneer of our modern doctrines. But the ages in which ill-regulated
passion exceeded--ages at least full of vitality and energy--gave place to
a more anaemic society. To-day the conditions are changed, even reversed.
Moral maxims that were wholesome in feudal days are deadly now. We are in
no danger of suffering from too much vitality, from too much energy in the
explosive splendour of our social life. We possess, moreover, knowledge
in plenty and self-restraint in plenty, even in excess, however wrongly
they may sometimes be applied. It is passion, more passion and fuller,
that we need. The moralist who bans passion is not of our time; his place
these many years is with the dead. For we know what happens in a world
when those who ban passion have triumphed. When Love is suppressed Hate
takes its place. The least regulated orgies of Love grow innocent beside
the orgies of Hate. When nations that might well worship one another cut
one another's throats, when Cruelty and Self-righteousness and Lying and
Injustice and all the Powers of Destruction rule the human heart, the
world is devastated, the fibre of the whole organism, of society grows
flaccid, and all the ideals of civilisation are debased. If the world is
not now sick of Hate we may be sure it never will be; so whatever may
happen to the world let us remember that the individual is still left, to
carry on the tasks of Love, to do good even in an evil world.

It is more passion and ever more that we need if we are to undo the work
of Hate, if we are to add to the gaiety and splendour of life, to the sum
of human achievement, to the aspiration of human ecstasy. The things that
fill men and women with beauty and exhilaration, and spur them to actions
beyond themselves, are the things that are now needed. The entire
intrinsic purification of the soul, it was held by the great Spanish
Jesuit theologian, Suarez, takes place at the moment when, provided the
soul is of good disposition, it sees God; he meant after death, but for us
the saying is symbolic of the living truth. It is only in the passion of
facing the naked beauty of the world and its naked truth that we can win
intrinsic purity. Not all, indeed, who look upon the face of God can live.
It is not well that they should live. It is only the metals that can be
welded in the fire of passion to finer services that the world needs. It
would be well that the rest should be lost in those flames. That indeed
were a world fit to perish, wherein the moralist had set up the ignoble
maxim: Safety first.




CHAPTER III

THE OBJECTS OF MARRIAGE


What are the legitimate objects of marriage? We know that many people seek
to marry for ends that can scarcely be called legitimate, that men may
marry to obtain a cheap domestic drudge or nurse, and that women may marry
to be kept when they are tired of keeping themselves. These objects in
marriage may or may not be moral, but in any case they are scarcely its
legitimate ends. We are here concerned to ascertain those ends of marriage
which are legitimate when we take the highest ground as moral and
civilised men and women living in an advanced state of society and
seeking, if we can, to advance that state of society still further.

The primary end of marriage is to beget and bear offspring, and to rear
them until they are able to take care of themselves. On that basis Man is
at one with all the mammals and most of the birds. If, indeed, we
disregard the originally less essential part of this end--that is to say,
the care and tending of the young--this end of marriage is not only the
primary but usually the sole end of sexual intercourse in the whole
mammal world. As a natural instinct, its achievement involves
gratification and well-being, but this bait of gratification is merely a
device of Nature's and not in itself an end having any useful function at
the periods when conception is not possible. This is clearly indicated by
the fact that among animals the female only experiences sexual desire at
the season of impregnation, and that desire ceases as soon as impregnation
takes place, though this is only in a few species true of the male,
obviously because, if his sexual desire and aptitude were confined to so
brief a period, the chances of the female meeting the right male at the
right moment would be too seriously diminished; so that the attentive and
inquisitive attitude towards the female by the male animal--which we may
often think we see still traceable in the human species--is not the
outcome of lustfulness for personal gratification ("wantonly to satisfy
carnal lusts and appetites like brute beasts," as the Anglican Prayer Book
incorrectly puts it) but implanted by Nature for the benefit of the female
and the attainment of the primary object of procreation. This primary
object we may term the animal end of marriage.

This object remains not only the primary but even the sole end of marriage
among the lower races of mankind generally. The erotic idea, in its deeper
sense, that is to say the element of love, arose very slowly in mankind.
It is found, it is true, among some lower races, and it appears that some
tribes possess a word for the joy of love in a purely psychic sense. But
even among European races the evolution was late. The Greek poets, except
the latest, showed little recognition of love as an element of marriage.
Theognis compared marriage with cattle-breeding. The Romans of the
Republic took much the same view. Greeks and Romans alike regarded
breeding as the one recognisable object of marriage; any other object was
mere wantonness and had better, they thought, be carried on outside
marriage. Religion, which preserves so many ancient and primitive
conceptions of life, has consecrated this conception also, and
Christianity--though, as I will point out later, it has tended to enlarge
the conception--at the outset only offered the choice between celibacy on
the one hand and on the other marriage for the production of offspring.

Yet, from, an early period in human history, a secondary function of
sexual intercourse had been slowly growing up to become one of the great
objects of marriage. Among animals, it may be said, and even sometimes in
man, the sexual impulse, when once aroused, makes but a short and swift
circuit through the brain to reach its consummation. But as the brain and
its faculties develop, powerfully aided indeed by the very difficulties
of the sexual life, the impulse for sexual union has to traverse ever
longer, slower, more painful paths, before it reaches--and sometimes it
never reaches--its ultimate object. This means that sex gradually becomes
intertwined with all the highest and subtlest human emotions and
activities, with the refinements of social intercourse, with high
adventure in every sphere, with art, with religion. The primitive animal
instinct, having the sole end of procreation, becomes on its way to that
end the inspiring stimulus to all those psychic energies which in
civilisation we count most precious. This function is thus, we see, a
by-product. But, as we know, even in our human factories, the by-product
is sometimes more valuable than the product. That is so as regards the
functional products of human evolution. The hand was produced out of the
animal forelimb with the primary end of grasping the things we materially
need, but as a by-product the hand has developed the function of making
and playing the piano and the violin, and that secondary functional
by-product of the hand we account, even as measured by the rough test of
money, more precious, however less materially necessary, than its primary
function. It is, however, only in rare and gifted natures that transformed
sexual energy becomes of supreme value for its own sake without ever
attaining the normal physical outlet. For the most part the by-product
accompanies the product, throughout, thus adding a secondary, yet
peculiarly sacred and specially human, object of marriage to its primary
animal object. This may be termed the spiritual object of marriage.

By the term "spiritual" we are not to understand any mysterious and
supernatural qualities. It is simply a convenient name, in distinction
from animal, to cover all those higher mental and emotional processes
which in human evolution are ever gaining greater power. It is needless to
enumerate the constituents of this spiritual end of sexual intercourse,
for everyone is entitled to enumerate them differently and in different
order. They include not only all that makes love a gracious and beautiful
erotic art, but the whole element of pleasure in so far as pleasure is
more than a mere animal gratification. Our ancient ascetic traditions
often make us blind to the meaning of pleasure. We see only its
possibilities of evil and not its mightiness for good. We forget that, as
Romain Rolland says, "Joy is as holy as Pain." No one has insisted so much
on the supreme importance of the element of pleasure in the spiritual ends
of sex as James Hinton. Rightly used, he declares, Pleasure is "the Child
of God," to be recognised as a "mighty storehouse of force," and he
pointed out the significant fact that in the course of human progress its
importance increases rather than diminishes.[8] While it is perfectly true
that sexual energy may be in large degree arrested, and transformed into
intellectual and moral forms, yet it is also true that pleasure itself,
and above all, sexual pleasure, wisely used and not abused, may prove the
stimulus and liberator of our finest and most exalted activities. It is
largely this remarkable function of sexual pleasure which is decisive in
settling the argument of those who claim that continence is the only
alternative to the animal end of marriage. That argument ignores the
liberating and harmonising influences, giving wholesome balance and sanity
to the whole organism, imparted by a sexual union which is the outcome of
the psychic as well as physical needs. There is, further, in the
attainment of the spiritual end of marriage, much more than the benefit of
each individual separately. There is, that is to say, the effect on the
union itself. For through harmonious sex relationships a deeper spiritual
unity is reached than can possibly be derived from continence in or out of
marriage, and the marriage association becomes an apter instrument in the
service of the world. Apart from any sexual craving, the complete
spiritual contact of two persons who love each other can only be attained
through some act of rare intimacy. No act can be quite so intimate as the
sexual embrace. In its accomplishment, for all who have reached a
reasonably human degree of development, the communion of bodies becomes
the communion of souls. The outward and visible sign has been the
consummation of an inward and spiritual grace. "I would base all my sex
teaching to children and young people on the beauty and sacredness of
sex," wrote a distinguished woman; "sex intercourse is the great sacrament
of life, he that eateth and drinketh unworthily eateth and drinketh his
own damnation; but it may be the most beautiful sacrament between two
souls who have no thought of children."[9] To many the idea of a sacrament
seems merely ecclesiastical, but that is a misunderstanding. The word
"sacrament" is the ancient Roman name of a soldier's oath of military
allegiance, and the idea, in the deeper sense, existed long before
Christianity, and has ever been regarded as the physical sign of the
closest possible union with some great spiritual reality. From our modern
standpoint we may say, with James Hinton, that the sexual embrace,
worthily understood, can only be compared with music and with prayer.
"Every true lover," it has been well said by a woman, "knows this, and the
worth of any and every relationship can be judged by its success in
reaching, or failing to reach, this standpoint."[10]

[8] Mrs. Havelock Ellis, _James Hinton: A Sketch_, Ch. IV.

[9] Olive Schreiner in a personal letter.

[10] Mrs. Havelock Ellis, _James Hinton_, p. 180.

I have mentioned how the Church--in part influenced by that clinging to
primitive conceptions which always marks religions and in part by its
ancient traditions of asceticism--tended to insist mainly, if not
exclusively, on the animal object of marriage. It sought to reduce sex to
a minimum because the pagans magnified sex; it banned pleasure because the
Christian's path on earth was the way of the Cross; and even if
theologians accepted the idea of a "Sacrament of Nature" they could only
allow it to operate when the active interference of the priest was
impossible, though it must in justice be said that, before the Council of
Trent, the Western Church recognised that the sacrament of marriage was
effected entirely by the act of the two celebrants themselves and not by
the priest. Gradually, however, a more reasonable and humane opinion crept
into the Church. Intercourse outside the animal end of marriage was indeed
a sin, but it became merely a venial sin. The great influence of St.
Augustine was on the side of allowing much freedom to intercourse outside
the aim of procreation. At the Reformation, John a Lasco, a Catholic
Bishop who became a Protestant and settled in England, laid it down,
following various earlier theologians, that the object of marriage,
besides offspring, was to serve as a "sacrament of consolation" to the
united couple, and that view was more or less accepted by the founders of
the Protestant churches. It is the generally accepted Protestant view
to-day.[11] The importance of the spiritual end of intercourse in
marriage, alike for the higher development of each member of the couple
and for the intimacy and stability of their union, is still more
emphatically set forth by the more advanced thinkers of to-day.

[11] It is well set forth by the Rev. H. Northcote in his excellent
book, _Christianity and Sex Problems_.

There is something pathetic in the spectacle of those among us who are
still only able to recognise the animal end of marriage, and who point to
the example of the lower animals--among whom the biological conditions are
entirely different--as worthy of our imitation. It has taken God--or
Nature, if we will--unknown millions of years of painful struggle to
evolve Man, and to raise the human species above that helpless bondage to
reproduction which marks the lower animals. But on these people it has all
been wasted. They are at the animal stage still. They have yet to learn
the A.B.C. of love. A representative of these people in the person of an
Anglican bishop, the Bishop of Southwark, appeared as a witness before the
National Birth-Rate Commission which, a few years ago, met in London to
investigate the decline of the birth-rate. He declared that procreation is
the sole legitimate object of marriage and that intercourse for any other
end was a degrading act of mere "self-gratification." This declaration
had the interesting result of evoking the comments of many members of the
Commission, formed of representative men and women with various
stand-points--Protestant, Catholic, and other--and it is notable that
while not one identified himself with the Bishop's opinion, several
decisively opposed that opinion, as contrary to the best beliefs of both
ancient and modern times, as representing a low and not a high moral
standpoint, and as involving the notion that the whole sexual activity of
an individual should be reduced to perhaps two or three effective acts of
intercourse in a lifetime. Such a notion obviously cannot be carried into
general practice, putting aside the question as to whether it would be
desirable, and it may be added that it would have the further result of
shutting out from the life of love altogether all those persons who, for
whatever reason, feel that it is their duty to refrain from having
children at all. It is the attitude of a handful of Pharisees seeking to
thrust the bulk of mankind into Hell. All this confusion and evil comes of
the blindness which cannot know that, beyond the primary animal end of
propagation in marriage, there is a secondary but more exalted spiritual
end.

It is needless to insist how intimately that secondary end of marriage is
bound up with the practice of birth-control. Without birth-control,
indeed, it could frequently have no existence at all, and even at the
best seldom be free from disconcerting possibilities fatal to its very
essence. Against these disconcerting possibilities is often placed, on the
other side, the un-aesthetic nature of the contraceptives associated with
birth-control. Yet, it must be remembered, they are of a part with the
whole of our civilised human life. We at no point enter the spiritual save
through the material. Forel has in this connection compared the use of
contraceptives to the use of eye-glasses. Eye-glasses are equally
un-aesthetic, yet they are devices, based on Nature, wherewith to
supplement the deficiencies of Nature. However in themselves un-aesthetic,
for those who need them they make the aesthetic possible. Eye-glasses and
contraceptives alike are a portal to the spiritual world for many who,
without them, would find that world largely a closed book.

Birth-control is effecting, and promising to effect, many functions in our
social life. By furnishing the means to limit the size of families, which
would otherwise be excessive, it confers the greatest benefit on the
family and especially on the mother. By rendering easily possible a
selection in parentage and the choice of the right time and circumstances
for conception it is, again, the chief key to the eugenic improvement of
the race. There are many other benefits, as is now generally becoming
clear, which will be derived from the rightly applied practice of
birth-control. To many of us it is not the least of these that
birth-control effects finally the complete liberation of the spiritual
object of marriage.




CHAPTER IV